When I’m at the PASS Summit in Seattle this week, I will need to remember that I can’t just step onto the road if I’m walking along the footpath on the right-hand side. In the UK and Australia, where we drive the correct side, it’s fine (just don’t tell my kids), because the cars that are nearest me are coming towards me – except of course, the ...

No really – hear me out.
Of course you create tables, and you query tables, and we say that data is stored in tables. The table is (rightly) a fundamental part of relational theory. But I find that when I think about queries and how they run, I need to approach the system thinking about the indexes that I’m querying, not the tables.
When you ...

We have just two weeks to go before Paul Randal and Kimberly Tripp touch down in the Boston area to deliver their famous SQL Server Immersions course. This is going to be a truly fantastic SQL Server learning experience and we're hoping a few more people will join in the fun.
This is where you come in: we have a few vacant seats remaining and we ...

If you've been looking for advanced training in the northeast, your wait is over. Paul and Kimberly will be gracing us with one of their famous ''SQL Server Immersion'' events the week of March 29.
This course will cover storage engine internals, indexing and performance strategies, and of course in-depth sections on database maintenance from the ...

In the first post of this series, I explained the bin-packing problem and established a baseline solution. The second post investigated ways to increase the packing efficiency. In none of these posts did I pay particular attention to performance – and frankly, it shows. Performance of all solutions presented thus far sucks eggs. Time to see what ...

Greg Linwood, a fellow SQL Server MVP, has started a series of articles in which he attempts to prove that having a clustered index on each table is not a good practice. However, he has failed to include the effects of fragmentation into account, so I decided to run some tests for myself. One of those test had rather upsetting ...